The best way to implement virtualization software is to put in the hardware.
The title of this blog post sounds a little bit funny maybe but in my opinion this is what’s happening right now. As we look what has happened in the past we all know what switch hardware vendors did to virtualize the network with the VLAN technology. Also do we remember and probably use some implementation of VPN. This technologies were introduced a long time ago and everyone is using them the days. More recently a lot of new technologies were introduced to the market. Here is a quick overview of all the initiatives that came to my mind.
Processor: Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT) and AMD Virtualization (AMD-V™) are trying their best to off-load as much as possible of the virtualization overhead onto the processor.
Network Interface: Possibility to divide a physical NIC into several virtual NICs but present them to the Hypervisor as physical NICs. Also think of TCP offloading onto the NIC so the dull repackaging of TCP/IP packets don’t have to be done be the hypervisor and processor anymore. Also think about the Flex-10 from HP where you can divide your 10GB into smaller dynamic virtual NICs.
Storage: More and more storage providers are offering integrated cloning features from their storage array’s to the virtual platform. Especially into the VDI space this makes a lot of difference. Now we are able to make hundreds of clones in just minutes. Not only saving storage but also processor resources.
Display: Here I will mention the Teradici solution; they offload the intensive work of rendering the display information onto a chip, resulting in a much better user experience and less processor utilization.
These are a few examples of what I can remember right now. There is a lot more and there is a lot more to come. So if we want to virtualization right we must make use of all this new technology. I think, as we did see from the past, we can really say that “The best way to implement virtualization software is to put in the hardware.”
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